Final answer:
The essential requirement for a theatre experience is the presence of both an actor and an audience because theatre involves the exchange of narrative and reception, creating a shared emotional journey and space.
Step-by-step explanation:
To address whether a theatre experience can still happen without an audience, we must consider what constitutes theatre in its most essential form. Theatre fundamentally requires an actor to tell a story and at least one person to listen. For something to be considered theatre, an audience, even if it is just one person, is required to listen to the actor tell a story.
This is the minimal requirement to create a theatrical experience. However, the presence of an audience is not only about the number of seats filled but about the collective emotional journey and the shared space which intensifies the experience on both sides of the stage.
By this definition, without an audience, the essential circuit of storytelling and reception that characterizes theatre is incomplete, and thus it would be false to claim that a true theatre experience can occur in the absence of an audience.